She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  Into that maelstrom jumped a woman named Shirley Chisholm, a member of Congress from Brooklyn. Chisholm would later become the first black woman to run for president, but in 1972 she was willing to settle for vice president—second spot on the McGovern ticket. Many women supported her. A meeting was called—a secret meeting, of course—to come up with a way to submit a petition to the McGovern forces. Lynn Sherr, then with the Associated Press but freelancing for Saturday Review magazine, attended the meeting. She went as a reporter. So did Nora.

  The meetings soon dissolved into chaos. It was one thing to want a petition demanding a seat on the ticket for Chisholm, but it was quite another thing to properly draw it up and have it delivered. It was then that Nora spoke up—a characteristically Nora performance. Somehow she knew enough about the rules and the process to tell the meeting how these things should be done. She was thirty-one at the time, not all that young by the standards of the Democratic Party’s insurgency (McGovern’s campaign manager, Gary Hart, was only five years older), but she was hardly a party activist. Nonetheless, she had the confidence, the inexplicable assurance, to command the meeting and impress the women in the room. Lynn, though, was appalled. They were journalists, not activists. She told Nora she had crossed the line.

  Without naming Nora, Lynn wrote the following in her Saturday Review article: “I tell her that I think she is losing her objectivity. . . . She sort of agrees.”

  Later, Nora was outed by, of course, herself. She wrote about what she had done and confessed regret. She had gotten “a little carried away,” is how she put it. Lynn, who recounted the incident in her memoir, deadpanned “I don’t think her [Nora’s] offer of help hurt her career one bit.” As all Esquire was soon to find out, Nora wrote her own rules.

  Esquire’s editors pronounced Nora’s breast piece a winner. There was, however, one problem. Arnold Gingrich, who had been one of the magazine’s two founding editors and was by 1972 its exalted publisher, had a rule about four-letter words. They were forbidden. Nora was told to excise “they are all full of shit.” She refused to do so. If that was taken out, she would not allow Esquire to use the piece.

  Nora’s kicker ended the piece with a pow! And it is impossible now to read the article and imagine it without that—a bit like The 1812 Overture ending with the tweet of a piccolo and not cannon fire. But killing the kicker would not have gutted the piece. It would not in the slightest have changed its meaning or have protected a guilty individual by sparing him or her some embarrassment. These are the usual reasons for a writer to put her foot down. None of these reasons are present in the “Breasts” article—no reason to risk a sinecure at the magazine that had published Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and in the 1960s had published, among many others, Saul Bellow. Nora’s foot went down anyway. Gingrich, to the dismay of the staff, folded.

  Other Esquire writers complained. Why did Nora get to use a four-letter word when they not only were told not to but had them snipped from their articles? Gingrich had no answer. He could not say that ordinary rules did not apply to the extraordinary Ms. Ephron. For the next issue, he reinstated the rule.

  Later, when Nora was commuting between New York and Washington, I got a call from a woman who was having a hard time at work because she was so beautiful. Women resented her and men hit on her—and no one of either sex took her seriously because, as she kept telling me on the phone, she was so beautiful.

  So, sensing a grave injustice, I went to interview her. She lived out in the Washington suburbs, in a high-rise where each apartment had a green steel door with the buzzer in the center. When this particular one opened, I saw a woman who was not a stunner, but pretty nonetheless, which I suppose could be a problem in certain workplaces. But the bigger problem for me was that she was dressed in a tight sweater and high, insolent black boots. This was beauty looking for a beast.

  Still, the poor thing was having a tough time of it at work. No one ever took the problems of beautiful women seriously. Everyone thought they were a joke, and I, as a columnist for the Washington Post, could rectify matters by adding beautiful women to an ever growing list of victims—you know, albinos, paraplegics, dwarfs, and beautiful women.

  Later that night, I told Nora the sad story of the beautiful woman, which represented, as far as I was concerned, not merely the plight of one particular woman but of beautiful women everywhere. Their story was a sad one and something had to be done. I, as it happened, was just the person to do something. Let me at the typewriter.

  Nora scoffed. It was a roaring scoff, the scoff of the MGM lion. The jungle shook. Contempt rained down on me. I don’t remember her words, but I do her scorn, her derision. There was an oomph to it, the torque of ridicule, and I could see after a while how wrong I was.

  Now, though, I was stuck. I could not write what I had set out to write. Nora had seen to that. Nora was smarter than I was. Nora saw things I didn’t. Nora saw around corners and beyond the horizon, and besides, she was a woman and knew things I did not about female beauty.

  So the next morning, up against a deadline and with nothing else to write, I wrote about the complaining beautiful woman. Imagine! Look who thinks she’s a victim. And while I did not use quite those words, I dismissed the woman and her complaints.

  She was, in so many words, full of shit.

  Of course so was I.

  Arnold Gingrich Was a Slow Learner

  * * *

  Four years later Nora again butted heads with Gingrich. This time the issue was not a question of questionable words, but a matter of journalistic principle. Nora had assigned a novice writer named Bo Burlingham to write a piece about Richard N. Goodwin. Better known as Dick, Goodwin had been a White House aide under both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and before that had worked as a congressional assistant.

  Along the Boston–New York–Washington corridor, the adjective most often assigned to Goodwin was “brilliant.” A second adjective might have been “controversial.” As it happened, an article about Goodwin had been published in the New York Times the very morning that Burlingham had come to see Nora at Esquire. The Times piece was about a publishing dispute involving both Goodwin and his future wife, Doris Kearns. The two of them might as well have been tabloid concoctions. They were connected to just about everyone.

  Kearns had worked for Lyndon Johnson in the White House and followed him to the LBJ Ranch in his Texas retirement. Goodwin had even better White House connections, plus an enduring relationship with the Kennedys—John, then Robert, and then Edward M., the senator from Massachusetts. It seemed that there was no one of any importance in Cambridge, Manhattan, or Georgetown that Kearns and Goodwin did not know. Burlingham’s article, over ten thousand words, was gaudy with famous names. It was also critical.

  Goodwin and Kearns were not happy with it. Even before the piece appeared, they implored Esquire not to publish it. Their pleas reached such a level that Gingrich, still the publisher but almost literally on his deathbed, was brought into the negotiations. Through it all Burlingham was kept in the dark, protected by his editor, Nora Ephron.

  Publication did not settle the matter. Goodwin went to war. He was represented by the same lawyer Richard Nixon had used to defend his presidency, James St. Clair. Goodwin threated to sue and then, as is routine in these matters, decided to accept a settlement of $12,500, which was precisely $11,000 more than Burlingham had been paid to write the piece. Esquire was then up for sale, and the settlement may have been an attempt to clear the books of suits. Still, it was bad form to buy off the irate subject of an article. What made it worse was the publisher’s column that was drafted in Gingrich’s name and published in the next issue.

  Gingrich essentially retracted Burlingham’s article. He wrote that after reading about Goodwin in his own magazine, he met the man and was surprised to find him a genuine gentleman and a total charmer. Burlingham’s portrait was “sufficiently at odds with the man himself that an appraisal is in order,” the publisher decreed. Gingri
ch then offered that appraisal himself: a takedown of Burlingham’s piece. Now it was Nora’s turn to go to war.

  For her next column, Nora repudiated Gingrich’s repudiation, insisting that Burlingham’s article had been true in fact and true in tone. She called Gingrich’s column “a bad moment for this magazine,” adding that Esquire’s owner, Abe Blinder, was wrong when he had told her that the settlement with Goodwin was fine because “there is no principle involved.”

  “I would like to state the principle involved,” Nora wrote. “It’s very simple. A magazine has an obligation to writers and readers to stand by what it prints.”

  Nora recounted something else Blinder had told her. Since Gingrich had by this time died and could not defend himself, he would not permit Esquire to run Nora’s piece. She wrote that in the piece itself—and then had it published by More, a magazine for the news business that was then widely read. It was tantamount to a letter of resignation and it was proffered, in the sense that it was proffered at all, on behalf of a writer whom no one had ever heard of. Burlingham could have been unceremoniously dumped without much fuss—after all, he had almost no reputation to either assert or defend. What’s more, his integrity could have easily been impugned. He was a recovered radical, a former member of the Weather Underground, a group known for inchoate violence and ideology. But Nora stood by him.

  No resignation was demanded of Nora. Esquire’s other editors completely supported her. She had done the right thing. Burlingham was in awe of this editor who had gone to bat for him. “I was amazed and incredibly grateful,” he said. “I would have done anything for Nora.”

  * * *

  Already, Nora had established an enviable rep. She had gotten the “Mush” assignment on the strength of the earlier profile of Helen Gurley Brown. That profile quoted Brown directly, accurately, and at great length—Brown certainly got her say—but Nora surely realized she was taking on a very powerful figure. Brown was a mercurial and potent magazine editor, married to David Brown, a former journalist turned Hollywood and Broadway producer. The Browns combined the worlds of New York and Los Angeles. They were rich and very influential, and they lived, appropriately enough, in a tower atop the Beresford Apartments on Central Park West, from which they could see nearly all of Manhattan. It was their town.

  Nora’s approach in the Brown article was both classic and instructive. The piece is incredibly detailed, intensely reported, so that there could be no complaint afterward of shoddy or superficial reporting. The article is also humorous—not with jokes or put-downs, but with the juxtaposition of facts—and it is chatty. It starts, for instance, with a memo Brown wrote to her staff in which she proposed an article “on how men should treat women’s breasts in love making.” It got leaked to the press.

  “Perhaps you remember it,” Nora wrote.

  Another writer might have made reference to the memo, sayings something like “Brown was referring to a memo she wrote on July 6. . . .” But no. Nora imparts the information as something she is sharing with the reader, a reader so much like her that she (or he) is likely to already know of it. Pull up a chair, reader. You have been invited over for dinner.

  In Nora’s telling, Brown is a faintly ridiculous figure, which she was in real life. At the same time, in Nora’s telling, she is a deeply sympathetic figure who is also deeply authentic. She is not some male magazine editor of the type who once edited women’s magazines and who wonders what they must want and what they must need—and what they can tell male advertisers who wonder all the same things.

  No, that’s not Brown. She is constantly at war with her corporate bosses who think of sex as an erotic silliness and not as an immense problem. Cosmopolitan was then being compared—likened, actually—to Playboy. But Playboy was a fantasy journal about fantasy sex—the Playboy Mansion was the Versailles of casual sex, in which naked women roamed as courtiers once did—while Cosmo was about problems, about everything that could go wrong in sex and love and career and even merely in how to dress for a cocktail party. The magazine was fraught with failure. Playboy was fraught with success. The latter was for the seducer. The former was for the seduced—and, too often, the abandoned.

  Brown was that woman—once and for a long time a single girl and always, just like her readers, a work in progress. The piece ends the way Brown must have wanted it to end—sympathetically. She is exposed as authentic. A smile vaults off the page.

  “Helen Gurley Brown Only Wants to Help” has an additional virtue. It’s a great story. It is a great story told well but, above all, honestly. For Nora, the story came first. It was paramount. Telling it was her job, her duty. She rarely let sentiment get in the way. That was admirable, occasional troubling. It cost her some friendships. It’s not clear, though, if it ever cost her a night’s sleep.

  An example, almost a trivial one, is Nora’s account of attending her tenth college reunion in 1972. Titled “Reunion,” it pretty much set out what Nora thought of her elite women’s school: not much. It was at variance with what her classmates recall of Nora’s college days, but that was almost beside the point: She tattled. She reeked of condescension. She had made it as a writer. The rest of her class—many of them, anyway—were still symbolically wearing the white gloves of 1950s housewives. They had taken their husbands’ names. She had taken the world by storm. It took years for the Wellesley class of 1962 to forgive Nora for that Esquire piece—and it’s probably fair to say that some members of the class never did.

  “It had an amazing effect on a lot of people,” her college classmate and later New York roommate Marcia Burick said. At one later reunion, Nora and Marcia joined three former classmates at a breakfast table. “One of the classmates said, ‘Are you on assignment now, Nora, or are you sitting here?’

  “Nora said, ‘Well, you never know.’ ”

  With that, three of the women got up and walked away.

  Nora was stung by the rejection. Burick could sense it, although, of course, Nora never admitted it.

  Oddly enough, Nora frequently mentioned what to her was the paradox of classmates who had become traditional housewives and found satisfaction in charitable or volunteer work as opposed to those who had chosen a career and had bumped up against a glass ceiling—either their own limitations or sexism. The former seemed a lot happier than the latter.

  In the name of honesty, in 1975 Nora wrote her piece on the woman who had, in effect, made her career: Dorothy Schiff. Her Esquire essay was shockingly uncharitable, and Schiff was grievously hurt by it. In characteristic style, it began with a charming disclaimer—“I feel bad about what I am going to do here”—and proceeded to flatten Schiff. Nora ended the article by referring to one done for New York magazine by Gail Sheehy in which she “quite cleverly compared” Schiff to Scheherazade. Nora had a slight improvement: “It would be more apt, I think, to compare her to Marie Antoinette. As in let them read schlock.”

  Again, a powerful person. Again, a tough piece. Again, faultless in its honesty. Again, a fragging, a typed grenade flipped over the shoulder with Nora sort of gleefully skipping away—and moving on to that most august of American political writers, the extremely august Theodore H. White.

  White was ripe for parody and criticism. He had written the groundbreaking Making of the President 1960, focusing on the dazzling John F. Kennedy. The book had transformed political journalism. All of a sudden, the errant meaningless detail seemed to matter so much. Who was in the room and what was the outside temperature and were there flowers on the table? The media-savvy Kennedy had given White unheard of access, and the onetime Time magazine correspondent had reciprocated by falling in love. No matter. Teddy White was Teddy White. He could be imitated, but never mocked.

  “He was alone as always,” she began. “A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it, and Theodore H. White was alone. It was a hot muggy day in New York when he finished. Or perhaps it was a cold, windy night; there is no way to be certain, although it is certain that T
heodore H. White was certain of what the weather was like that day, or that night, because when Theodore H. White writes about things, he notices the weather, and he usually manages to get it into the first paragraph or first pages of whatever he writes.”

  For Theodore H. White it was a stormy night when he picked up the August 1975 Esquire.

  BeeBee Fenstermaker Goes to War

  * * *

  In 1973, Nora traveled to Israel to cover the Yom Kippur War for New York magazine. Upon rereading, the three articles she wrote not only hold up but are surprisingly prescient. She sensed right at the outset that the Jewish state was involved in a never-ending war, and war, she reported with what I’d like to think was regret, was what the Israelis did best. “The Israelis wage war better than they do anything else,” she wrote in the December 3, 1973, issue.

  She had arrived in Israel on the thirteenth day of the war, which had famously begun on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur with surprise attacks by Egypt and Syria. She wrote on how the American press was covering the war and on the role of women (“Women in Israel: The Myth of Liberation”) and on the outsized role of religious authorities. She visited the Egyptian battlefield, a piece which, in case you were expecting what might be called a Nora Ephron touch, is appropriately grim: “At one point the bus stopped about five kilometers from the Suez where two tanks had been blown off the road. Three Egyptian soldiers lay in the sun, black and swollen, filling the desert air with the smell of death.”